Braaaiinss

You should have seen the look on that crankhead's face! By the time I finished with him, he was begging to be arrested by the police, babbling about zombies trying to eat his brains!

I was summoned last night to help out in a nasty hostage situation that some locals had gotten into when they chased a pair of robbers from an armored car heist. The pricks had killed the driver and one other guard was badly wounded. But they didn't notice the local news copter that had seen the heist and called in the law (but not before airing it for their viewers and getting that all important exclusive footage). Once the jig was up the robbers had fled into a nearby house and were holding the old lady and her grandson hostage, threatening to kill 'em if the locals didn't let 'em slip away.

I was called in and sent towards the house as an unarmed police hostage in exchange for the boy. As soon as those bastards saw me lurching up the driveway, things started to go sideways in a hurry. The boy freaked when he saw me and bolted for the cops. The taller of the two crooks took a step outside to shoot the kid, and was dropped by a sniper with a well placed shot. I stepped over his body and into the house to see the fat, balding crook holding the old lady in an armlock with a big ass Desert Eagle .44 Magnum held to her temple. As soon as he got a look at my nasty mug, the bastard went from the flushed red of exertion to pale-as-a-sheet white. He looked into my eyes, and brought the gun up towards my chest. The old lady had some spunk in her as she bit into his other wrist, and did a mule kick into his balls. Dentures and curses went flying, but he never took his eyes off me. He managed one shot before I closed on him, arms extended in my best Frankenstein pose, as I muttered "Braaaiinss". The impact of the bullet was barely noticeable as I grabbed the gun and broke his wrist with one hand, and reached for his neck with the other.

When the local SWAT team stormed in, they found him in a fetal position clutching his nuts in his good hand, barely coherent. I was in the process of handing the lady back her teeth when I had to catch her in mid-faint.

It took a few hours today to debrief and get all the appropriate paperwork signed and the bullet holes plugged up again, but I am finally free to relax here with you, my gentle readers.

It sure is weird going into a situation knowing that I can't be hurt. Sure is different from being a beat cop. Hell even the SWAT goons aren't invincible. There just isn't enough body armor to keep even the bravest officer from getting the shakes after a shootout. Yet here I was, shot through the chest cavity by one of the biggest, nastiest guns out there, and I didn't feel anything other than a shift in my momentum from the impact. I can look at the whole incident with a clarity unclouded by the adrenaline I would've felt just two years ago.

No dry throat. No shakes after realizing what could have happened. No exhilaration at surviving a tough struggle. No real sense of victory or accomplishment. Just a plain, clear knowledge that two lives were saved, and one was avenged.

But what is vengeance when there is no beating heart to burn with the need for it? What have they done to me? What have I become?

Perhaps there are no real answers to these questions, but I am going to find them if they exist. I know with a certainty that I am an experiment. I was the first dumb bastard to successfully fufill that weird contract for them by getting killed, and then be raised back up again. But I know of others who signed up for this too. I owe it to myself, to those other poor saps and to all the living to find out what kind of monster I have become.

It would be too easy to become an impersonal killing machine. The perfect soldier. The perfect robot. A machine with the intelligence and the...soul?...of a man. But a creature who can shed no tears, suffer no pain, feel no love.

The really bad part, the part that no robot would ever face, is the memory of all that is now gone. Oh that bastard Drake says he is working on a better neural system for me, that they are still refining systems that may bring some sense of things like touch back to me, but how can that be the same?

In my past life, I wasn't much for books or even deep thought. Mine was a life that was experienced, both good and bad and everything else in between. Now I must find meaning in my thoughts and in the wisdom of others.

What a strange damn journey is ahead of us. Are you ready for that? Am I?